The other Durga Puja! We celebrated it at home for 4 days and it was more than 4 days of festivity and get-together for us!
Memory is still fresh with the smell of those early mornings when filling water for the Puja activities was the first chore of the day. We did not have a water storage back then and whatever we could collect in vessels and buckets would be consumed for the Puja. Of course we had those cemented tanks where the rest of the water is stored even now in our Shillong home.
Then Ma would begin her normal day-to-day work followed by a bathe and then ensuring that the Puja rituals got taken care of! Same with Baba! Two of our very close family friends would be the first to come. Jethi and dida(aunt and granny) would be the first to come, do the preparations in time, rest a while, go to their homes and come back again. They did this year after year, extending that kind of support sometimes your kin fail to provide.
Then the aunts followed and other relatives followed. We would have mouth watering lunches, specially prepared, the main bhog prepared by Ma and the others by my Pishis and we even had cooks.
It would seem exaggerated if I say that we did not know the count of people who could come home to have the prasad because this far outnumbered the people who we invited. And there would be frequent complains from people if we happened to miss someone in our invite list. Over the years Ma and Baba thought of making the whole event simple because of the difficulty in managing everything, difficulty in getting help, difficulty in getting priests etc but it was a blessing for us that every year we had the blessings to have all these people in our homes just for a simple prayer or a simple prasad.
And there are other stories too of some of our specially talented neighbors, who specialized in emptying an entire 'handi' of Khichdi much above their capacity and walking up and down the Umpling roads for most of the night just to digest. And yes this is true!
Then we and the cousins use to have awesome time eating, feeding, playing and being happy with everyone around.
With passing time comes several constraints and we had finally to shift this Puja to Kamakhya temple where dad visits every year to witness the proceedings being done.
Memories remain...
Memory is still fresh with the smell of those early mornings when filling water for the Puja activities was the first chore of the day. We did not have a water storage back then and whatever we could collect in vessels and buckets would be consumed for the Puja. Of course we had those cemented tanks where the rest of the water is stored even now in our Shillong home.
Then Ma would begin her normal day-to-day work followed by a bathe and then ensuring that the Puja rituals got taken care of! Same with Baba! Two of our very close family friends would be the first to come. Jethi and dida(aunt and granny) would be the first to come, do the preparations in time, rest a while, go to their homes and come back again. They did this year after year, extending that kind of support sometimes your kin fail to provide.
Then the aunts followed and other relatives followed. We would have mouth watering lunches, specially prepared, the main bhog prepared by Ma and the others by my Pishis and we even had cooks.
It would seem exaggerated if I say that we did not know the count of people who could come home to have the prasad because this far outnumbered the people who we invited. And there would be frequent complains from people if we happened to miss someone in our invite list. Over the years Ma and Baba thought of making the whole event simple because of the difficulty in managing everything, difficulty in getting help, difficulty in getting priests etc but it was a blessing for us that every year we had the blessings to have all these people in our homes just for a simple prayer or a simple prasad.
And there are other stories too of some of our specially talented neighbors, who specialized in emptying an entire 'handi' of Khichdi much above their capacity and walking up and down the Umpling roads for most of the night just to digest. And yes this is true!
Then we and the cousins use to have awesome time eating, feeding, playing and being happy with everyone around.
With passing time comes several constraints and we had finally to shift this Puja to Kamakhya temple where dad visits every year to witness the proceedings being done.
Memories remain...
